In response to Ronan O'Gara's words from the oval office...
Pause. “I mean, he played for Bishopstown. Did you know that?”
Ronan’s column in last Friday’s sports supplement mused about the possible benefits for Irish rugby if those playing Gaelic football and hurling were available to the IRFU.
Touchy one.
Ronan’s point was well made and factually correct: if some of the athletes who play Gaelic football in particular were to opt for rugby it would no doubt broaden the pool of talent. He also admitted to his own bias, trying to find some ways to strengthen causes like that of Munster, which are close to his heart.
On the other hand, picking Kieran Donaghy as a test case was a bit of a slip. After all, the big man from Kerry isn’t just a star Gaelic footballer. You don’t have to imagine the potential of Donaghy with a rugby ball at the age of 10, because you can see the reality of Donaghy with a basketball at the age of 30.
Basketball is a sport with a far more global reach than rugby: should we decide to bypass rugby along with Gaelic football and hurling to focus all our athletes on hoops to see how well we can do in that sport?
We’ve also qualified for the Euros in soccer. Wouldn’t the transfer of skills be smoother from Gaelic football to soccer than it would be to rugby?
One of the more pressing challenges to rugby was also visible in last Friday’s Irish Examiner sports supplement, and it wasn’t the strength of Gaelic football and hurling. The page after Ronan’s column featured former Irish rugby team doctor Eanna Falvey discussing the problem of concussion in rugby; the pages before carried quotes from Jonathan Sexton, O’Gara’s replacement in the green of Ireland, insisting on his fitness to play despite recent concussion scares.
Finding a resolution to this ongoing problem is focusing minds in rugby everywhere. Pulling more people into the game isn’t the answer.
Having sports in mosaic rather than monochrome form may occasionally be frustrating, but I think most Irish people like the fact that there’s a variety to the diet here rather than a slavish devotion to a single game.
That kind of tunnel vision may occasionally be rewarded at the elite level but is that enough? Isn’t it better to have high quality outlets across a range of sports rather than a herd adherence to one pastime?
It was also a little disingenuous last Friday, by the way, to omit a couple of stark examples of the traffic going the other way. A couple of names that will be well known to Ronan left nailed-on places with the Cork senior hurling team to throw their lot in with Munster, after all, and more than one observer on Leeside would feel Tomas O’Leary and Darren Sweetnam are more valuable even now to the Cork hurling project than the Munster rugby project.
The demise of the luxury GAA player
England v Scotland 1963
— The League Magazine (@Theleaguemag) January 20, 2016
Jim Baxter scores from the spot past Gordon Banks pic.twitter.com/nsxiXrG19b
Where have all the luxury players gone in Gaelic games?
Where is the lazy, fat free-taker? Where is the towering fielder who can’t run ten yards? The wing-back who can point a loose ball from 90 yards but has never gotten in an actual hook?
This category is precise enough and doesn’t include a true genius, for instance. Many years ago there was a book in our house about Celtic and Rangers, and one glum ex-Celtic player summed up playing against the gifted Jim Baxter by saying you just made your peace with the fact that he was always going to do a certain amount of damage.
A luxury player isn’t like that. If he were undroppable he’d simply belong in a different stratum, but the true luxury player is one who doesn’t thrive against all opposition, or with all combinations of team-mates.
One could argue that the LP could usually only be played if another team-mate could be relied upon to provide the amount of work that the L P wouldn’t.
Nowadays, of course, the LP can’t survive. Modern Gaelic football and hurling have nowhere the LP can lurk unseen, contributing nothing, until his side get on top and he can contribute the closing flourish to their hard-earned victory.
NFL bosses like to get personal
When a coach made the statement during my combine interview... "I see you have dreads, you smoke weed don't you?" pic.twitter.com/fu2BLm55uF
— Austen Lane (@A_Train_92) February 23, 2016
I don’t follow the shenanigans at the NFL Combine too closely. Maybe I should.
Last week, a former NFL player, Austen Lane, remembered some of the stranger questions he was asked at the Combine, a meeting which evaluates prospects for the professional American football.
The athletes are put through their paces in physical tests, but they also face questions from the men who are thinking of employing them.
Lane claimed that one team’s official said: “I see you wear dreads, you smoke weed, don’t you?” and that another asked: “Boxers or briefs?”
So far, so odd. But it got weirder.
“If you had to kill someone, would you use a gun or a knife?” “If you could kill someone and get away with it, would you?”
And top of the list: “Do you find your mother attractive?”
You can understand that a team making a multi-million investment in a player they just met will want to get to know him and to work out his personality. But ... really?
What would ya expect from a pig, only a grunt?
I thought about dealing with Eddie Jones’s comments about Jonathan Sexton’s parents here, but working on the principle of ‘what would you expect from a pig, only a grunt’, I’ll pass. Anyone with that kind of wiring is bound to say something equally stupid sooner rather than later.
For those who contacted me for a reading recommendation, though, I give you Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. If it’s as good as The Trip To Echo Spring, it’ll be worth the effort.
